Republicans for preschool? Forget about property-tax reform

Yesterday I got the following release from two incumbent Republican legislators:

Please join Senator Jennifer Beck and Assemblywoman Caroline Casagrande as they tour 3 community based pre-school centers in Asbury Park. All three centers are women owned businesses.

Asbury Park is the ONLY school district that has fully implemented the Abbott mandates governing preschool - every 3 or 4 year old child eligible for preschool is served in a licensed DOE and DCF approved community based center.

The other Abbott Districts either provide a mixed delivery system where preschool is offered by both the public school and community based centers, or the school district has taken all preschoolers and moved them into district owned school buildings.

The preschool industry in the State of New Jersey is a 3.5 billion dollar economic engine. The preschool and early care/education industry is the ONLY non governmental industry in New Jersey where the businesses are primarily owned by women and staffed by women. 68,000 women statewide are employed by the preschool and early education industry.

What the heck? The "Abbott mandates governing preschool" are clearly unconstitutional. The state constution calls for free public schools only for those between the ages of 5 and 18. The court's 1998 decision ordering the state to pay 100 percent of preschool costs in the 31 Abbott districts is perhaps the worst example of judicial activism by any court anywhere in America.

As for Asbury Park, it's perhaps the worst example of waste by the public education bureaucracy anywhere in America. This is the district that receives in excess of $29,000 per pupil in state aid. Even Gov. Christie cites Asbury as the worst example of Abbott excesses. And Chris Christie is notoriously squeamish about expressing opposition to the Abbott rulings.

We'll never have property-tax reform as long as the court controls the purse strings. On Monday Republicans rallied on the Statehouse steps in opposition to this exact sort of abuse. If the Fair School Funding act were to be implemented, the Abbott decisions would be meaningless and these parents would have to pay for their own preschool - just as the parents do in all of those towns that provide the revenue to pay Asbury Park's outlandish expenses.

That's not the worst part, though. The worst part is that the preschool program began in a Republican administration, when Christie Whitman did a tag-team on the taxpayer with her handpicked chief justice Deborah Poritz to impose this unconstitutional program on us.

The real message of this press release is not to the residents of Asbury Park, but to the residents of all the suburban towns in that district and all over the state. And that message is: Forget about property-tax reform.

ALSO: As areader notes, that line about preschool being "an economic engine" leaves out the fact that the state appropriates in excess of $600 million a year on the Abbott mandate. All of that is tax money. That's a brake on the economy, not an engine.